The End of the Whole Mess (thing)

I personally think the end of the world is an intriguing idea. Hell, I like the end of the world. I love it even, find it downright fascinating. I've read a lot of Stephen King in my time, a nasty habit passed on to me by my mother and my aunt, who are die-hard fans. My firstexperience was The Stand when I was twelve or thirteen years old. Admittedly, I was frightened of its size, and rightly so; after I'd finished it I was exhausted and didn't ever want to read a novel again. I needed something shorter so I asked my aunt, "What do you got that's shorter, shorter, shorter than The Stand? With a devioustwinkle in her eye she said, "Step in to my parlour, sir," referring to her linen closet.

Under her bed, I happened upon a bookentitledNightmares & Dreamscapes. Liking the title, I plopped myself on her worn, ugly-brown, yet impossiblycomfortableloveseat, and took a look. To my great delight I found that it was a book of some twenty-three short stories, and even one poem thrown in for good measure. To this day I have not read all of the stories, having left a half-dozen or so unread, for whatever reason. The second short story, entitled "The End of the Whole Mess," has always spooked me, far worse than any scrap of writing that King has put to paper--and that's no small bit of paper, I'll hasten to add. Let's hear what the narrator says the story's about in its first line:

"I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the Messiah..."

No one is safe, not even the narrator or his brother, the "Messiah". This is clearly and frighteningly apparent in King's writing over the last three pages of the novel. Howard Fornoy, our narrator and voice throughout the entire telling of the story, loses his mind as he writes. The following passage is located near the very end of the story, but if I were to add [sic] to every misspelling, there would be one between every word, and I don't want to do that.

"we...wor big long sleekers in the ran, so no war and everybobby started to get seely we din and I came back here because he my brother what his name

"Bobby"

Think that's good? Very rarely, I think, an author can structure a sentence so well and so perfectly within the context of the story that it will stick out forever in your mind, scare the reader, make the reader cry, cause near-hystericalgales of laughter. I will give one more line of this excellent story away, the one that cause my hands to tremble years after I lost interest in Stephen King, years after I lost my need to be scared. This one is also near the end of the book, and it scared the shit out of me.